Social Security Benefits

Roger Godsiff: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how much has been loaned to benefits claimants as short-term benefit advances in each month since April 2013; and how much was loaned under the crisis loan scheme in each of the 12 months up to April 2013.

Steve Webb: Crisis loans were made from a specific fund to meet immediate short-term needs in an emergency or as a consequence of a disaster when a person had insufficient resources to prevent a serious risk to the health or safety of themselves or their family.
	Unlike crisis loans, short term benefit advances are not loans from a separate fund,
	but are advances against future benefit payment in certain specific circumstances. Where possible, benefit is put into payment rather than offering an advance. There has to be a likely benefit entitlement in order for an advance of benefit to be paid. Because of these factors, it is impossible to directly compare these advances to crisis loans for alignment to benefit.
	Table 1 shows the monthly amounts advanced since they were introduced.
	Table 2 shows the monthly expenditure on all crisis loans in 2012-13.
	
		
			 Table 1: Monthly amounts of short term benefit advances 
			 Month Expenditure (£) 
			 2013  
			 April 297,000 
			 May 437,000 
			 June 378,000 
			 July 504,000 
			 August 484,000 
			 September 433,000 
			 October 387,000 
			 November 367,000 
			 December 1— 
			 1 Figures not yet available Note: These numbers have been gathered from the DWP Central Payments System and have been rounded to the nearest thousand. 
		
	
	
		
			 Table 2: Monthly expenditure on crisis loans in 2012-13 
			 Month Expenditure (£) 
			 2012  
			 April 8,572,300 
			 May 9,412,500 
			 June 8,956,000 
			 July 9,533,100 
			 August 9,453,500 
			 September 8,881,200 
			 October 9,765,200 
			 November 8,225,800 
			 December 6,612,600 
			   
			 2013  
			 January 8,712,500 
			 February 7,547,600 
			 March 7,097,900 
			 Notes: 1. The Crisis Loan information provided is Management Information. Our preference is to answer all parliamentary questions using Official/National Statistics but in this case we only have Management Information available. It is not quality assured to the same extent as Official/National statistics and there are some issues with the data, for example, these amounts do not include expenditure on applications which were processed clerically and have not yet been entered on to the Social Fund Computer System. 2. Crisis loan expenditure figures are rounded to the nearest £100.